This invention relates generally to material handling devices and more particularly to apparatus for inverting the facing position of a conveyed document.
In purpose, the invention is to provide a device for inverting sheet materials after one or both surfaces of the sheet have been affixed with images, indicia, designs, coatings etc. For example, in some printing operations it may be necessary to print upon one side of the sheet or record medium during a first run and on the opposite side of the record or sheet medium during a second run. Depending upon the types of feeding and stacking mechanisms being utilized, it may therefore be necessary to manually rearrange the order of the record prior to commencing a run to insure proper sequence. By eliminating this need for manually rearranging the sheets or documents one saves time and therefore reduce overhead.
From the standpoint of copying or reproducing machines, it is highly desirable at the end of a copying operation to have the originals and the copies stacked in a particular sequential order irrespective of the initial sequence of the originals. In most machines the order in which both originals and duplicates are delivered to the respective receiving station is wholly dependent upon the initial sequence of the originals. That is, if a stack of documents enter the machine in a particular order, the documents coming from the machine will be stacked in a particular order dependent upon the entering sequential order. It would, therefore, be advantageous to have a copying machine which supplied the originals or copies in a selected order independent of the order in which the originals entered the machine.
In many photocopiers and printing devices the several pages of a printed sequence are delivered from the printer onto a stack with the first page of the sequence face down at the top of the stack or face up at the bottom of the stack. Consecutive sheets are stacked in the same inverse order below or above the first page. Manual inversion of this stack per se will not correct the inverse orientation. Each sheet in the stack must be individually inverted to obtain proper consecutive orientation between the pages.
Various prior art devices have been devised to invert or reverse the position of articles advanced from supply sources. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,416,791 there is disclosed a document inverting apparatus that deflects a document into a receiving chute from its normal path of flow, leading edge first, and withdraws the document trailing edge first to transport an inverted sheet or document. In U.S. Pat. No. 3,523,687 an inverter device is shown that inverts by moving sheets or cards through a series of angular races by means of a drive roller. Other inverting apparatus includes U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,227,444; 3,556,512; 3,615,129; 3,700,231; 3,833,911; and 3,856,295.